Could there be a connection between lettering
on a modern soft drink can, Nazi Germany and our founding fathers?
Maybe. Let’s see.

Before Joe Taylor (that’s me, above in 1972) started digging up fossils
all over creation, I designed typefaces (lettering) and did art work for
several Patriot organizations.

So? What’s this about Mr. Pibb, and the Nazis?

About 1979, while working on some projects about America's true, Christian
heritage, I had the privilege of meeting with the "little ladies", as they
were affectionately known.

Verna Hall and Rosalie Slater published two thick volumes about Christian
Self-Government, full of America's most profound documents. Despite
their "grandmotherly" appearance they were historians in the extreme. They
knew not only political history, but art history as well.

(A similar font designed
by my art partner, Joel Peck - who is now my assistant here in
the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum)

In conversations with them it came out that I was the designer of a
typeface called “Blippo Black” (1969). They perked right up when
I told them my idea for the face had come from an unpublished design from
the thirties originating in the German Bauhaus school. Oh, yes! They
knew “all about” the decadence of pre-nazi, German culture, and how it
led to Hitler's Third Reich!

My design was not good, they would have me know. Witness the lack
of serifs on the ascenders and descenders. This lack of "toes" on
the letters was unacceptable, theologically. See, to a real, Christian
presuppositionalist, nothing is secular. Even lettering design must
be theologically “correct”. Better, they advised me, were the Roman
classical letters such as Times Roman, commonly used for the copy in most
newspapers. None of this pre-Nazi, sans-serif stuff!

Unfinished Bahaus face

Blippo Black was named by my German-Jewish boss, Mr. Robert Trogmann,
in 1969. It premiered in Berlin that same year. My design was a black
version of Burko Bold, which came from the unpublished Bauhaus face of
the thirties.